UK nominates 11 sites for Unesco world heritage status

The Forth railway bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland has been nominated for Unesco world heritage status along with St Helena and the Lake District. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian Murdo Macleod/Guardian

The Forth bridge, the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon died in 1821, and the Lake District are among 11 places the government will nominate today as worthy of becoming world heritage sites to be ranked alongside the Pyramids and Stonehenge.

The government will also make a third attempt to have the corner of Kent where Charles Darwin wrote the book that changed the history of science recognised as a world treasure.

John Penrose, the tourism and heritage minister, said: "Few places in the world can match the wealth of wonderful heritage we have available in the UK. The 11 places that make up the new 'UK tentative list' are fantastic examples of our cultural and natural heritage, and I believe they have every chance of joining famous names like the Sydney Opera House and the Canadian Rockies to become world heritage sites."

Places that failed to make the 'tentative' list include Blackpool, the former RAF airfield at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire, the Rows shops and half-timbered houses in Chester, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Western Railway.

The government has been consulting on the type of sites which Britain should put forward after concern from Unesco, which has maintained the list since 1972, that it was increasingly dominated by castles and cathedrals in western Europe.

There has been a conscious determination to broaden the geographical spread of the list and the types of sites nominated, leading to the inclusion of penal sites for transported convicts in Australia, four hydraulic boat lifts on a Belgian canal and the wonderfully named Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump prehistoric butchery site in Canada.

Britain is nominating a judicious mixture of natural, built and industrial sites, including the slate industry of north Wales with its spectacular shale heaps still bearing witness to the days when Welsh slate roofed half the world, the Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, Scotland's beautiful Flow Country, the endlessly repainted Forth railway bridge which had the longest single cantilever span in the world when built in 1890, Gorham's cave complex in Gibraltar, and Cresswell Crags, the limestone gorge honeycombed with caves which has some of the earliest evidence of human habitation in Britain and the country's only known Ice Age rock art.

The list is completed by two leftover scraps of the British Empire: St Helena and the Turks and Caicos.

The government has still not given up on Darwin's home, now in the care of English Heritage, where he wrote On The Origin of Species. Once the scientist found Down House in 1842 he left as rarely as possible for the rest of his life. He wrote the Origin and all his later work there and conscripted his children as assistants in taking observations on the fauna and flora in his own garden and the surrounding fields, which are remarkably unchanged.

The government first nominated it in 2007 but withdrew on being warned the Unesco advisers were not convinced of its genuine scientific importance.

It was resubmitted, with the ingeniously coined description "landscape laboratory" in 2009 to mark the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, but still failed to make the cut. The government, undaunted, will again add it to the list of proposed sites.

The list of sites judged among the world's most precious now runs to 911 in 151 countries: 704 cultural, 180 natural and 27 mixed.

The new nominations were due to be considered by the world heritage committee in June in Bahrain but, due to the turbulent state of politics across the Arab world, the meeting has been switched to the Unesco headquarters in Paris.